I have run the marathon...

.... I have fought the good fight.
Well, I don't know about that. I don't know that the fight was "good", so few fights are, and I don't know that I put up any resistance to the Forces of Dimness.
But it's over.
Holy Week is a bear.
Resurrexit, sicut dixit.
That is the main thing, and that is the constant, so all the rest is of little matter, or should be.
But I was disappointed in how little time for prayer I found in the liturgies, and I was not to blame for most of it.
Usually I have to be honest, and say that I am in the same boat as Toby, that we have only ourselves to blame if we "find that [we] cannot enter prayerful into the liturgy" as she drama-queened in that most enlightening of conversations all those years ago in front of the mural.
The dog and pony aspects were kept to a minimum, but they were in evidence.
The arbitrariness ('zat a word?) of various manufactured events, the noisiness and garishness and brightness (although my objections to the latter may be lingering effects of shingles...)

Good Friday was the best, of course... it saddens me because I used to take so much joy in the Vigil, and I could not do that now even as a civilian.

And between Coward and shingles, I could not take refuge even in those few times that I had decided to allow myself, in the sanctuary of another sanctuary.

Well, next year in Jerusalem, eh? ("Next year West of the Loop" just has no resonance...)